The Kennel Murder Case

Michael Curtiz's 1933 film sets the period's popular detective Philo Vance against a locked-room murder. A collector everybody hated is found dead in a room bolted from the inside, and at first sight it looks like suicide. Working from the pieces of a broken Chinese vase, Vance establishes that it was murder and how the room was sealed. Curtiz cuts the film extremely fast; across its seventy-odd minutes there is not a spare scene or a stretched explanation. William Powell's Vance is polite, dry and never hurried, and the manner he would develop in the Thin Man films is already visible. It is considered one of the tightest of the classic-era mysteries. Who it's for: viewers who like locked-room puzzles and thirties studio detective pictures. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a realistic investigation and psychological depth.